On the afternoon of March 20th , Director of Urban Finance Research Institute of the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China (ICBC), Dr. Zhou Yueqiu, gave a lecture to the MBA and finance major master students on “Economic situation analysis and banking reform and development” at the school of Economic and Management, UCAS.
Firstly, Dr. Zhou summarized the main characteristics of China's macro economy operation in the recent period, and pointed out four important turning point changes after the financial crisis have played a key role in judging the sustained downside economic growth: demographic dividend declines due to negative growth of labor age population; real estate development enters a new stage as urban household residential has exceeded one; infrastructure construction faces challenge of high local government debt; and the slowdown in global trade impacts manufacturing in China. As China's macro economy enters the new norm, although there stand out the "four down a liter “issues (decline in economic growth, drop in industrial goods prices, decline in entity enterprise profits, rising probability of economic risk), but there are still some bright spots. Taking the year of 2015 for example, employment remained robust while 13.12 million new urban jobs created, which is higher than yearly expectation; structural adjustment achieved positive progress; the service industry occupied a half for the first time; consumption supported economic growth while the contribution of consumption increased by nearly 15 percentage while prices dropped. These results are worth to pay attention.
Looking to China's medium and long term economic trend, Dr. Zhou believes that China has entered the late stage of industrialization in general according to relevant indicators. And it is more difficult to achieve rapid growth while the total amount of economic growth has develop to a certain extent. Dr. Zhou also interpreted regional strategies, commercial system reform and financial system reform policies of “the integration of Beijing Tianjin Hebei Regions, Yangtze River economic zone, The Belt and Road” from the perspective of economic structure transformation and tackling the challenges, which helps to deepen the students’ understanding on major issues.
As the person in charge of the strategic department of ICBC, Dr. Zhou introduced the main line and concrete measures of bank industry reform and development based on specific bank work, such as the general principles of customer orientation, diversified orientation, light capital orientation, market orientation. He then introduced non-credit business, such as the vigorously-developed intermediary business, investment business and trading operations. What’s more, He vividly introduced the achievements in E-commerce and overseas expansion of ICBC, which aroused great interest of the students.
In Q&A session, the students discussed the combination of bank transformation and internet plus, light capital and leverage, the impact of replacing business tax with value-added tax (VAT) on the banking industry with Dr. Zhou. Dr. Zhou’s pellucid explanation gained great praise from the students. At the end of the seminar, associate Prof. Yan Yan, the seminar host, and the students expressed sincere gratitude to Dr. Zhou Yueqiu.
